Jan 2003, 11 entries

I spent the first few days back from vacation catching up and completing my yearly performance review, as well as half a dozen peer reviews and a manager review. As usual, the more I investigate my own performance, the less convinced I am that I’m performing at all (the alternative is that I’m on some insidious and unpredictable, though wholly deterministic, auto-pilot). The decisions I’ve made can all be traced back to a few personality traits that, though I have tried, I cannot alter. Anti-social behavior, secrecy, and pessimism underly a soft-spoken, pseudo-kind exterior. Every chance I get, I try to become more outgoing, less self-critical, but it never works.

I think my will is more or less an imperfect voting mechanism that makes decisions based on incomplete and inconsistent data, nothing more. Based on the senses, I construct a whole out of unconnected fragments, and project meaning onto a fuzzy approximation of my understanding of reality. This, as you can tell, is merely a string of words that approximate meaning and exhibit no passion.

Let’s iterate on a metaphor for a while. Let’s take a sand storm. Imagine a field of dunes whipped up into the sky with a powerful wind. You’re watching events from behind sand-proof goggles:

Do the grains of sand have free will? I’m sure if you take a look at it, you would be able to find communities of sand swirling together, in some ways it may seem that they’re pushing and pulling each other, spending lifetimes in marriage and divorce. Is their mixture of patterns and randomness distinguishable from the interactions of humans?

Does the wind exist independantly from the sand? If the wind is life, is that force in some way effected by the sand it carries, by its weight and its shape…

...this is just horrible. I don’t actually think about these things, I just make them up and bore you with them. Sorry.

I was thinking about this metaphor. Have you ever been looking for your glasses, looking on the top of the refrigerator, on the coffee table, in the bathroom, and then realize that you’re wearing them? Oh, I don’t feel like actually forming the metaphor.

Okay, a little I more did this and that. Tomorrow night is Jim’s going away party—he’s going to Cambodia and Thailand for three months, and will be traveling for part of the time and also taking pictures for World Vision and Care International during that time. It sounds very exciting and I’m jealous of him. During those same three months I’ll be working 40 hours a week at a dot com and maybe getting a few hours each night to myself to work on a website or a book.

Just when I thought that I was not going to be able to find any music to like ever again I found a whole slew: Kraftwerk, Interpol (slowly growing on me), Spoon to name a few. Perhaps there are still entertainment receptors in my brain yet.

I got a small mention in this morning’s Seattle Times article, “Serving up the world on the Web.” Unfortunately I was too jetlagged to provide any quotable comments, and it doesn’t link to All Consuming, but it’s a well-written article that explains some of the interesting work in web services, in case you’re interested.

Back from vacation and super jetlagged to boot. The return flight was three legs (dubai → frankfurt → washington dc → seattle) and about 30 hours all together. 75 degrees and sunny on one end, 45 degrees and rainy on the other.

I have many emails to reply to, but I’ll hopefully get through those sometime this weekend. There are a lot of cool things that people have started to do with All Consuming, in particular the SOAP API, but I haven’t yet looked into it thoroughly.

Here are some pictures from the trip: Vacationing in Dubai. Hopefully it will provide some insight into the relaxing, sunny town of Dubai and our enjoyment therein. I have no pretentions for the quality of these photos for the most part—I wasn’t trying to capture Dubai necessarily, but rather our presence in Dubai. Otherwise there would’ve been a lot more scenic shots with ironic contrasts between modern and traditional scenes, people wearing dishdashes and talking on cell phones, driving their SUVs, etc. I like this picture of me riding a fake wave. Other good memories include the camel races, dune buggies, scuba diving (with sharks), and long afternoons by the pool.

Some cool sites that have sprung up while I was gone: Swappingtons (which looks to be like a specialized Nervousness), and Eat More Words which I think has great potential… I only wish I could be involved some way because I’m a little jealous of their great idea. Knowing them, though, they’re going to make something quite good even without me.

I had a semi-revelation the other day, but I can’t quite articulate it now. I’ll try to recapture it sometime in the next day or so, but it had to do with the universe’s death grip on us and why we’ve been around for so long but have not found a consistent or reliable understanding of our purpose here.

I will be on vacation in the Middle East (Dubai in particular, if you must know) visiting K’s parents from January 10th to the 27th. Most likely I will not be updating this text experiment during that time. Things to read in the meantime:

My new really rough short story, Silly Universe. Please let me know how horrible the ending is, because it pains me so.

Keep an eye on what they’re doing over at McSweeney’s. Always.

It never hurts to see what’s happening at the crossroads of books and blogs: All Consuming (mentioned recently in InfoWorld)

There must be one or two weblogs out there worthy of being read, but you probably already know about them. I read the same ones you do, I’m susceptible to the same power laws as you are unfortunately.

When you think of me, try to think of me lying by a poolside sipping from a martini glass held by my toes. I haven’t had 16 days off in years, baby.

First draft of a story I’m using to explore some of the things I’m interested in developing in the next draft of Man Versus Himself.

I could’ve held an emergency company meeting with everyone in the building, I suppose, or I could’ve held a smaller meeting with my five senior vice presidents and my twenty-three vice presidents so that they could in turn hold meetings with their immediate reports, an ever-diminishing horizon of meetings all the way down until there were meetings for the dust particles to attend, “Particles of skin and hair, you’re fired,” but this morning, after running twelve miles to work, setting out at 3am, resting at the top of Cube Hill with a pink glazed donut and an orange juice purchased together for $2.18 at 6am, walking the rest of the way, heart taking full and deep exhilarating breaths, change jingling in pocket, I just didn’t have the forethought to buy the book on how to dissolve your billion dollar company in a hurry, so I did what any new economy CEO who hasn’t slept in two weeks would do: I sent a high priority email (with accompanying little red exclamation points) to all 5,000-plus employees informing them that today was their last day in the office, thanks for your time, your 110%, your blood, sweat, and tears, etc, because Silly Universe Toys was closing down as of today, as of right now. You were alive again.

One minute and fifteen seconds later according to my thin golden watch, the two Johns were in my hexagonal art deco Hudsucker Industries meets the Enterprise office, closing the door softly behind them. John Smeer, Senior Vice President of US Retail, looked like he had something in one of his doll eyes, for it was a little swollen—though the other eye seemed fine. A batch of stray silver was folded at a rebellious angle against his otherwise slick helmet of hair, indicating previous shuffling at high speeds; if I had to guess, up the eight flights of stairs from his floor to mine. John Trappe, Senior Vice President of Marketing, adjusted his glasses on his long beak and wiped something from his fat lips—was that a crumb from his morning scone, was it a currant scone? It looked like they had both flown down the halls from their respective departments, swooped down the stairs side by side, caught their breath, concocted a quick plan, smoothed their suits, and walked into my office, confident as flamingoes. Though they didn’t typically get along, in this profession friends and enemies were interchangeable, they mixed and matched alliances like doll clothes for greatest net benefit. A series of glances were exchanged to see exactly which team I would be on, and after it was settled that I would be on my own team, against them, the match began. And go!

“You can’t just close the company,” said John Smeer. “Of course I can,” I replied. “No, actually, you can’t,” squawked John Trappe, “it’s a publicly traded company.” “So?” “Well, as you know, every investor in the company has a stake—you own part of it, the shareholders own part of it, and we own part of it,” John Trappe said, indicated his and the other John’s soft executive large hollow pink bodies. “Let’s hold a meeting with all the senior board members and talk about it,” suggested John Smeer. “Let’s not,” suggested I. “Be reasonable, what happened to you all of a sudden? Are you having trouble at home? A mid-life crisis? Did you have a near-death experience?” John Trappe received a Masters in Psychology, or maybe that was the other John. “No, nothing has happened, it just pains me to see everyone working like this, why wait for death to take everything away, better to let go of hopeless dreams on our own terms. Oh, I know it sounds so vapid out loud. No, it’s not morbid. It’s all very clear to me, you’d be able to say I had woken up if that expression still held any meaning whatsoever.” “What’s in that bag?” asked John Smeer. “My jogging clothes.” “You ran here? Look, Sal, let’s slow this down a bit. You aren’t thinking this through. You don’t need to shut down the company if you’re tired of it. Just step down. Find a replacement. You won’t send 5,000 people into unemployment and you won’t lose all the work and time you’ve invested in Silly Universe. Let’s talk about this, there’s no rush. This is the voice of reason speaking to you, you must realize this.” “John, I appreciate your comments, but I’ve already thought about all of this extensively.” “For how long? Have you stopped to sleep during that time?” “Several days. Long enough. No, but it doesn’t matter. I know what I want, and it’s to shut everything down. It’s just right. It pains me to think that so many people are wasting their lives on my account, it’s a huge unforgivable waste and I don’t want to wake up to this company anymore. As CEO, I happen to have some control over the situation, as my vision built this company, and it can tear it down. You would do the same in my place, I’m sure of it, if you could know my full thoughts on the matter.” “A couple days is not long enough to—” “I’m doing everyone a favor. I’m going to call the newspapers, and once news gets out, things will start shutting themselves down on their own, I’m hoping. The market will react to the news and send us into bankruptcy. It’s really quite elegant, almost artful, if you think about it.” “We can’t let you do this.”

My phone started ringing. “Hello?” There were several other people at my door, knocking, lining up, glancing at the Johns through the glass, choosing teams, wiggling the knob as if trying to figure it out. “Sal, it’s Nancy Norder from—” “Put her through. Thanks. Nancy? What have you heard? Excellent. One second.” I covered the phone and waved the Johns away from the door, but it was too late, they had already opened it. People filed into my room and the noise level was escalating as each senior executive tried to bring order to the others, and, failing that, raised their voice. Demands met in the air, swooped across the room, and perched on my narrow but padded shoulders. “Nancy, I’m going to have to get back to you, something else has come up, I’m sorry.” I hung up the phone. “What’s all of this about?” I asked, but then shocked with myself for having let that voice of uncertainty slip out, and followed up immediately with, “Everyone, out of my office. I’ve made up my mind and nobody here is going to change it. When the dust has settled, maybe I’ll explain myself a bit more. I can’t do it with all of you yelling at me.” I hiccoughed. They took that as a sign of vulnerability and my attempts at restoring order were swept under the current of their powerfully flapping wings. Instinct from years of meetings made me lean into their insinuations and their guilt games, listening to their arguments because the texture of their abrasive logic felt good—it was like sandpaper on your face, like claws into your arm, the mild pain of which devoured you and helped you forget whatever else might be bothering you, in this case the even greater pain caused by the knowledge of the futility of work, of earning a living, of building a brand, of selling a product, of creating anything at all in this world because then your life transformed from that of creator into that of a mindless centurion whose only purpose was to protect that creation.

Silly Universe Toys, on paper, was my third company. In practice, it’s easier to think of Silly Universe Toys as the third generation of the original company, as most of the players have remained the same throughout. John Smeer was my best friend from third grade, and my partner at Jiggly Toys, our first misinformed foray into the vicious marketplace of children toys. We got stomped on by our more experienced competition, early and fast. It was over in less than four months, though it took us five years to admit it. John Trappe was Chief Inventor Renold Rarrick’s uncle. Renold Rarrick was a friend from college with whom I co-founded the second company, Connected Crafts. He was a recent math and computer science graduate whom I took on as Chief Inventor, and together we built a new company that designed toys which were capable of communicating wirelessly with one another. Using simple rules, these toys could simulate intelligent group behavior if you got enough of them together in a room. These toys were brilliant, still are, but they never made it to market due to lack of funding, high production costs and, in my opinion, being too early for their time. The company was still around somewhere, rotting in some lawyer’s filing cabinet.

Our single product at Silly Universe was based on the early throw-away prototypes of one of Renold’s human-shaped robots. Materials cost approximately two cents per doll, just cloth, thread, and a little glue, all of which we bought in bulk overseas, like everyone else. We learned our lesson, there are no computer chips or moving parts. We made male and female, light and dark, four models which we never deviated from, and then, before doing anything else, approached rather systematically over six hundred clothing, accessory, and shoe companies to see if they’d like to advertise on our doll, on Silly Sal. At the beginning they didn’t, in fact they wouldn’t even talk with us most of the time, it being a waste of theirs, but we didn’t relent and approximately two-thirds of the way down our list some imaginary threshold was crossed and all of a sudden they did want to talk to us, and they wanted to do business with us—everyone, including those who had ignored us at first. We see futuristic Gaps in futuristic movies, we see video game characters buying McDonalds hamburgers, we see brand name jewelry featured on the covers of pulp fiction, and now we see Abercrombie & Fitch tees, North Face slickers, and Old Navy Capri pants on simple, nondescript, dolls. The whole beast moved and took us in, though no single executive or consumer ever made the call themselves. We sold advertisements on doll shirts, doll shoes, doll accessories, and when those spaces grew stale, to places on the doll that were sown over and hidden from the child at time of purchase (there was a percent likelihood, confirmed in user tests, that the child would tear their doll apart at some point and, much to their surprise, experience a creative ad for sewing kits or for trash bags). Silly Sal was subsequently swept up by the media, featured on Regis and Kelly and David Letterman, and an article appeared in the New York Times and on the cover of People magazine—the standard treatment. The doll transformed into a virtual platform, a neutral landscape upon which brands could compete for the attention of children and, as we soon realized, adults both. The doll became a host for all of man’s myriad corporate dreams of brand awareness, and appealed to our lifelong need of self-projection onto the real world, or at least our lifelong need to respond to intelligent marketing. It must have been a slow news week, we joked. In hindsight, laying the burden of marketing and distribution onto companies that were good at it, in exchange for a small percentage of sales of course, allowed us to make a small margin on a top selling product that had virtually no production, design, or research costs. In hindsight, it was brilliant, and luckily that’s when the stories were told. We did not expect that people would begin dressing the doll similarly to themselves, or that companies would begin to give Silly Sal suits out as a complementary gift for their purchase of a full-sized suit of the same make, but nor were we surprised.

My Sal was dressed in tan Hart Schaffner Marx Wool Long Rise Dress Pants and blue Joseph Abboud Windowpane Shirt, Dr. Martens 1461 Series dress shoes, and no tie, the final result being classy yet anonymous, a Silly Universe hallmark. These people in my office had dedicated their professional lives to their own cheaply made, brand-aware, replicas; to a vision, a dream, they might say, where everyone might have their own doll, where everyone would see themselves in the things that they had bought, a reality where personality and brand became one. To complain about the negative aspects of selling out here and now at such a late date would be completely disrespectful to the reader, but I hope you got the insinuation.

“Steve, close down the fulfillment centers.” “I can’t do that, Sal.” “And why not?” “You need to think this through.” “Steve, do I work for you or do you work for me?” “Sal, I work for your best interests and the company’s best interests.” “You’re fired.” “We know, sir.” “But do you understand? You’re fired. Fi-red. Go home. But first, tell me who reported to you, though I could just ask HR. Who was in charge of running the warehouses, who, I ask, will be so kind as to obey the CEO and turn off the manufacturing lines and the sewing machines and whatever else there is out there that I couldn’t care less about?”

What more could I do? Here I was, in my office, the bridge of my own personal overpriced cruise ship, faced with countless layers of middle management that I had placed there for the express purpose of allowing me to stop thinking about the company in anything but the most general terms. For years I had run the company with simple commands like, “Open a branch in Cambodia and one in Tokyo. Ensure me that we will have incremental sales in Asia of 5% in two years.” Now the arms were not responding to the commands sent to them from the head, and the head did not know how to move the fingers on its own. I had long ago forsaken the insight into the warehouses. In order to turn off the whatever-they-weres, maybe kettles of boiling oil, maybe manufacturing lines of drills and mechanical arms, I would have to convince my Senior Vice President of Fulfillment that he should convince his reports so they could convince their reports all the way down until the guy who was paid to plug in the Limb-O-Matic 3000 was told to stop, or was fired. This is how Silly Universe is run, how I designed it to run. Clearly I needed to think of this from a different angle. I picked up the phone and called Nancy Norder. She obliged herself to listen to my story, and promised to get the story out within the hour, though it never did. At the time though, I felt I had done something, that I still had some power, I felt like a chicken’s amputated head that was able to bite its own leg before the body ran away. Mm, dark meat. The metaphor was so vivid and real to me at the time that I ate fried chicken that night and, refusing to go home and lose everything, slept under my desk, using my suit as a blanket. I was so close to the heart of the company, geographically speaking, and yet somehow it had ceased to be mine. Sleep came just like that after eluding me for two weeks. The next morning, everyone returned, nobody turned off production, and I doubt that even a single project deadline slipped as a result of my every effort. Was it that email, or had the separation happened long before? Was there any permanent bond at all between CEO and company, head and body, me and my Sal? My own lawyers refused to defend me, which gave me sufficient reason to fire them. Many insisted on talking me through it, as if it were simply a temporary bout of insanity that had gripped of me, or some well-known predetermined mental instability due to middle-agedness, or maybe even some teenage drug I was experimenting with. Others begged me to take some time off, to wait it out and return when I was well again. Psychologists began calling me, talking to me in melodic and patronizing tones, agreeing with everything I said without actually making the necessary logical leaps—in short, the whole city had joined in trying to slide this cancerous cell into a guarded and diluted environment to be disposed of in some endless series of high-priced therapy sessions, and if not that then the gutter of forced retirement. For the record, I retained my sanity and my lucidity throughout, at any point I could have demonstrated that I was capable of running the company as I always had—I had not lost the ability to attend board meetings or fire off emails with my latest ideas worthy of a visionary—I wanted to let them know that I was choosing to act this way. It was a choice and one whose motivation, I felt, could be rationally explained in a matter of minutes, given the appropriate setting, the appropriate words, and a sympathetic soul.

I’ve exchanged twenty-four years of my life, if you started counting all the way back in the Jiggly days, for this Silly Sal doll, but that’s not what this is about. One night’s self-doubting sleep could not rob me of the pleasure of dressing Silly Sal in his miniature corporate clothes—this simple sensation I experience now glimmers more brightly than any other accessible memory that I keep. Here it is, here it is, now it’s gone. Sal would live on without me, despite me even. I enjoyed pulling his arms off, and his legs, and his torso—the stuffed cotton now strewn across my mahogany desk—and closing my eyes so as to avoid any marketing details on his entrails, holding in my hand his little head. It reminded me of that time, of that bird (What was his name? Yes, Pretty Bird.), whom I accidentally killed by pulling off her wings because I had heard of clipping a bird’s wings but had never purchased the book on how to do so correctly. The dead bird was stuffed, an impatient but creative adult’s solution to a confused child’s tears. It sat on my shelf for years next to my crab shell, my scorpion encased in glass, my June bugs and my dried and inflated blowfish. On the cusp of two ages I asked my mother if their dear and departed souls were aware of the nice display that I had made of them on my shelf and the nice scenarios I had written for them during play time, and she had said no but I had refused to believe her at the time.

Sleep fed me quick-cut images and scenarios filled with employees, friends, reports, re-orgs, manufacturing lines, press releases, apologies, hand-shaking and acceptances on all sides. In those dreams the flock of dolls and employees flew together as a single flock, making a full loop around the universe, but when I occasionally realized that I was dreaming, I felt broken, full of regret, and my heart (if not hand) begged with all its stretched and pulsating weight for a chance to return. One of those emotions you only really experience in sleep. The only time I ever talked to them again, several months later, the company informed me of their willingness to let me come back, to hand back control of Silly Sal, whose popularity was waning but not irreparable, but in the twenty seconds that we talked neither they, nor I, suggested an antidote to the loss of pride, conviction, and hope that would possess me when I woke again.

I was sitting in a really boring meeting today about our yearly performance reviews, and at one point I surfaced out of my doodling haze to notice a graph with a bell-curve on it. I thought about bells for a minute. Bells, bells, bells.

The bell-curve was illustrating how people tend to fit into these categories where the majority of the people are average, and those with little to no skill dwindle off in percentages to the right and people with extraordinary talent shrink into the bell’s lip on the left. More or less. So, no matter where you are, mail clerk or CFO, you have an equal chance of being average when considered with your peers. Average is a horrible place to be, no matter how great your peers are. This year, I would have trouble debating that my own contributions to the company were anything more than average.

For the longest time I’ve felt like a coin rolling down a coin sorter machine, passing up the slot for small coins like dimes (food industry, customer service, etc), rolling right over holes for training, design, and web development, but this year, as a Technical Product Program Manager, I feel like I’ve met my match—I’m not longer excelling. I’m average. I’m actually having to work very hard just to keep up. Some may have the impression that I’m over my head. I’ve seen many of my friends fall into their respective slots over the years, and always hoped that I’d never reach mine… or that it would at least be several more years before I did. It’s possible, of course, that this slot just leads to another coin machine which will let me continue moving up on some other scale, or even that I’m not falling in the slot so much as just stalling for a year or two before my momentum carries me forward. People who become CEOs and CTOs, did they doubt their momentum at times?

I mean, this is my life, my one and only non-karmic, soul-searching, God-finding, art-making life according to current beliefs… at some point I’m going to have to accept that I’ve either reached my slot or will never find it, but one hopes that it would come with the reward of achievement and job satisfaction, and that I would not read articles titled What To Do With My Life with any sort of empathy or envy for those who know. I guess I’m still young, by some standards. I feel old. I feel like I’ve wasted years, that I’m not moving quick enough, that I’m not risking enough or experiencing enough, that the cold grip of death is tangling its fingers with my own.

Back to bells. I started thinking about how simple and pure it seems to have an entire company reduced to a bell curve, and the power of that company can be symbolized by the gong that that bell makes when struck. So, in another context involving this stretched metaphor, brought on by the wistful daydreams of a corporate employee, wanna-be writer, Carrie Bradshaw writes, “Is writing a book much like creating a bell? All of this work goes into the material, the lining, the lip, the thickness, the play, the pull, the hunt and grab, but in the end your book will be judged not by the quality of any of these individual elements, but rather the tone and the rigor and the depth of the sound that is achieved by its entirety when struck.”

A ringing bell, it seemed to me at the time to be the perfect metaphor for the powerful effect that a complex artful object was meant to create in an audience. Dong!

I’ve been sharing some of the backend code between this site and All Consuming and accidentally broke part of this site when I added features to the other. In particular, nobody was able to leave comments here—I know at least one person tried. I’ve been considering opening up comments so that even people who haven’t created an account can comment too. On the one hand, I think the quality of the comments is higher now, when registration is required, than they would be if it wasn’t required, just because it’s more of a hassle for people and those luke-warm followers of my every word don’t like hassles. On the other hand, sometimes even a boring comment is better than none at all, especially during my weaker moments. Any thoughts? (I realize that getting feedback only from those who’ve registered about whether we should open the floodgates is a little biased. Try to compensate for your bias before commenting.)

I went back and read some emails that I wrote four and five years ago, thanks to the nature of archiving sent messages that yahoo does by default (all my hotmail messages are gone gone forever). It was a time when I was transitioning from my prolific career as a scribbler of letters to the high-tech notion of email, and I think a lot of the style that I had used when writing with pen and paper sort of spilled over into email during the first few months of 1998. It was clear: my emails back then were much more polished and thoughtful than my emails are today. It was sort of distressing, as I had assumed that I would improve in quality and richness of tone without effort, just by having existed longer in the medium.

Imagine Carrie Bradshaw at her computer, typing this week’s vapid question… “Is it possible that, as everything becomes more convenient and we become lazier, our brains too will go on holiday?”

I woke up again in the middle of the night completely exhausted but unable to keep my head from descending into immediate nightmares (without even falling asleep). I thought it might have something to do with my location, my bed, so I got up for a while and tried to look at the computer, but the screen was so white and my eyes were so tired that it was painful. So I sat on the couch and I could tell the cats were weirded out because they started yowling in sadness. Immediate nightmares on the couch too. One that I can remember visually is where I was in some remote location and we were eating these squid-like creatures who were still alive. Their bodies were in tubes and their legs came out one side, which is the side you were supposed to suck on. But they were stubborn and would not come out of their shells. Then, one that someone else was eating got mad and, while she was eating it, it came out of its shell (into her mouth) and bit her. She couldn’t get it out of her mouth for a while but when she did her entire mouth was filled with long thin tentacle-like structures which were actually teeth that stretched out on long thin gum-like poles. It was horribly disgusting. My mouth got the same thing, and was completely filled with teeth and gums, and they sort of moved on their own in unison, like flagellum. It has been disturbing me all day. In order to keep my mind off of it, I’ve been fixing bugs on various websites that I’ve been putting off for a while. And I added a new feature to All Consuming. I guess that’s all I have to say today.

I wrote this way back in college. Re-reading it, it has something nice about it, though not great. Enjoy!

A Lady, a Poet, and a Fool walked into a valley. The Lady said to the Poet, “I like this place right here, it makes me happy. Can we stop here?” And the Poet replied, “I don’t know, can you?” Then the Fool made an offended face and said, “All I hope is that you can stop this hi-larious comedy of yours. And while you’re doing that, would you also explain to me, in a sonnet perhaps, how a fool like myself might learn to love someone?”

The Fool, taller and older than normal fools, unfolded into the air a large red blanket for them to sit on. The Poet, whose face was more pleasant in a photograph than in real life, placed his hand on his breast, summoned an authoritative voice and uttered, “Ah, love. I’m glad you happened to ask. A-hem! ‘This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long.’ And remember, ‘Love is long-suffering, love is kind, love does not seek its own, and love bears all things.” And then the Lady said, “Thou hast broughteth a tear to mine eye.” The Lady and the Poet and the Fool sat down on the red blanket at the bottom of the valley near a small lake to have their picnic and eat sandwiches under the sun with each other. They were happy.

A mile away, at the top of the valley, appeared a bear. It saw the three people and began walking down in their general direction.

The Poet was the first to see it, and he said, “Oh look. A bear’s coming. We’re going to die.” The Fool and the Lady smiled and laughed. “Anybody care to make a toast?” asked the Poet.

The Fool said, “To poetic justice, then? I knew I shouldn’t have forgotten the map. But alas, I suppose each man must wrestle his own bear. And why might you two be here?” The bear continued to approach at a light skip.

“I believe,” said the Lady, “that I am here for the wine, what do you say?” she asked the Poet, who replied, “I’m waiting for the pendulum. No, I’m waiting for Godot. So who wants ham and who wants roast beef on their sandwich?”

The Fool, whose name meant one who lives in continual regret, says: Roast Beef.

The Lady, who was wearing a black dress, mourning the death of her son, also said: Roast Beef, thank you.

And the Poet, who was best characterized by his wavy thick hair that never stayed down, but was always reaching for the luminous sun, said: Well, then, I guess I’m the ham, har har.

And still, the bear was approaching down into the valley, in a full gallop, teeth bared.

“So do you miss your baby?” the Poet asked the Lady, as he chewed a mouthful.

“Yeah, I guess so. You know it’s hard to tell, I’m not very smart. Maybe I miss him, maybe I just feel sorry for myself because he seemed a part of me. Sadness really is a wonderful emotion. Of them all, I think I love sadness the most.” The Lady filled three deep glasses of red wine for her dry friends.

Then the Fool said to the Lady, “I’ve got a story to cure your sadness. Here’s how it goes: The Virgin Mary, Paul the Apostle and Pontius Pilate walk into a desert valley, all of them on the verge of dying of thirst. An angel of the Lord appeared to them and said, ‘You may each be granted one wish before you die.’ Pontius Pilate said, ‘I wish I never would’ve done all the things I’ve regretted.’ And so all of his regrets were reversed: he became healthy and wise, and among many other things Barabbas the bandit died, and Jesus the Messiah came back to life. The angel of the Lord looked to Paul the Apostle and Paul said, ‘I wish that sin had never existed.’ Instantly there were animals and plants everywhere they looked, and angels in the air, and everyone was naked and innocent. The angel, suddenly in a good mood, asked the Virgin Mary, ‘Okay, and what would the lady like?’ And she replied, ‘I would like my Lord to have my wish.’ So Jesus said, ‘I wish that everything would go according to my Plan.’ And so the animals and angels vanished, sin returned, Pontius Pilate lost his wisdom and health, Jesus disappeared, and they were thirsty.”

Meanwhile the bear was now running down into the valley and the Lady and the Poet and the Fool were at the bottom by the small lake.

The Poet said with his hand holding his hair down, “So did they still die? Mary and Paul I mean.” And the Fool replied while breathing in the fresh air, “Oh, of course they did, I guess. I mean, its not a real story, so I don’t know for sure. It isn’t very funny, is it?”

The Lady, finishing her third glass of wine, while the Poet is only on his second and the Fool hasn’t touched his first, says, “It’s a wonderful story. I hope Mary lives, though, she doesn’t deserve to die, she was so pretty. Not like me, I’m ugly, but that’s okay, I’m still happy. I love lots of people, and that makes me happy enough, you know, there are so many great people out there.”

And the Fool said, “Wait, I think I have something to say. I think the time’s approaching for some of us to come clean concerning certain matters. The bear, for instance. It’s been running towards us for close to a minute now and I’d say that it’ll be on us in one more. As I said earlier, we’ve all got some kind of ‘bear’ in our lives. Be it accepting our inability to be God, or accepting our unrequited love, or understanding the inner pain of being ugly, each of us has to confront it some day. Now what I’m saying is that we can’t just run from this ‘bear’ forever, because someday, somehow, it will come back to haunt us again.” The bear was looming and they were laughing.

The Lady added, “The cross I bare is carved from the dense wood of drought. I have had a horrid fear of drying up, since my baby left. Babies, they’re drenched and breathing with screams and laughter, but us, we’re cracking apart with a parched yellow gravity. Yes, humans, we are old scrolls, we may be mighty, but we’re still old jars of frowning clay.” The bear was storming and they were being sentimental.

And the Poet added, “I thought I was the only one here with the poetic license to bullshit in the name of profundity. But you sure make me proud of you.” The bear was racing and they were reminiscing.

The Fool, remaining absolutely still, said, “Well, in fact, what I’m trying to say is that we must, must, must confront this ‘bear’, soon, today even.”

“Yeah, but don’t forget what our wise teacher from Hallmark taught us—before you can beat the bear you must first learn to love the bear,” said the Poet.

The Lady said, “If only I was beautiful, like my baby.” The bear was waging war, and they were making wishes.

Then the Fool, letting out a big windy sigh, said, “You know, I’m beginning to think that my ‘bear’ may be an illusion—not even real. What if I walked down to that lake there and took a swim, and ignored the ‘bear’. Without me to feed it my fears, it might just cease to exist.” And the Fool walked over to the edge of the small lake and stood over it, peering at his shaking and shivering reflection. The Lady and the Poet followed him. But then the Fool looked intently at his wrist and, without looking back (and without any regrets), he ran away from the bear as fast as he could, back to his one room studio apartment.

The Lady and the Poet watched the Fool run away, then the Lady said, “I seem at once completely happy and completely sad. Everything’s nicest right before it’s over. Let’s go swimming.” So the Lady took off her black dress of mourning and stepped into the cold thirsty lake, healing her dryness and uniting her with the present.

Then the Poet took off his clothes and followed the Lady into the lake. Searching for something profound, he repeated, “Love bears all things.”

The bear was almost there.

Then as the Lady dipped backwards into the cleansing water, she said teasingly, “If I might asketh thou, for which Love dost thou barest the bear?” And the Poet said, “For the love of being read.” The bear was so close.

The bear was there. The bear was here, in the lake. The bear was on the Poet and the Lady, tearing them apart like fortune cookies:

Red blood, mud, skin and water spin,
Rocks, bone, but nothing else their own.
The Lady knows the bear can’t be beaten,

So she joins him bare, and so easily eaten.
It’s a poet’s fate to be torn apart line by line, limb by limb,
Whereas a fool is content to live, and write about him.

All my opinions are falling away. Things that I have at some point felt very strongly about I am now indifferent to. I do not side with one nor the other. I think this falling away of opinion has been a long time coming though, as I can recall instances going all the way back to elementary school where I have been the person who cannot side with any argument, always sitting lamely between two strongly held and supported opinions. I’m not indecisive, though. Not in the way that people ask you what you want to do tonight and I cannot think of anything. It’s more like there will be several things that sound equally fun—going out to dinner, seeing a movie, going to a club, and even doing nothing. I have no way of rating them in order of preference, they all just fall flat on the opinionated floor.

This trend goes contrary to our culture’s expectation—we are supposed to grow more and more opinionated as we become more and more aged and wise. Perhaps I am not becoming any more aged or wise. I can’t rank anything in order of preference: favorite band, favorite person, favorite restaurant, favorite politician, favorite sports team, favorite moral code, favorite sexual orientation, favorite this and favorite that. Same with least favorites. I marvel in jealousy at people who flat out refuse to do something because they “don’t drink coffee” or “don’t eat vegetables” or “don’t leave the city” or “never listen to rap” or “only date boys” or “only vote independant” or whatever… all of these actions being driven primary by an opinion of something or other. You can follow up every “I only do this” statement with a “because I think __” opinion. Some people overflow with opinions about everything, this actor was good in these movies but sucked in these movies, this author’s best book was this and the other ones have sucked, and I don’t know what to think about them.

This is just a heads up. My opinions are falling away. I’ll see how things continue in the future, and find out whether or not this is a trend of a growing force in myself, or just a 26 year flu.